Language

A Biological Model

Ruth Garrett Millikan

Groundbreaking work from one of the world's foremost philosophers of mind and language

Millikan is at the forefront of the movement to integrate philosophy with science

Highly original new position, denying that 'rules of language' exist

Radical implications for theories about how language is learned

Language

A Biological Model

Ruth Garrett Millikan

Description

Ruth Millikan is well known for having developed a strikingly original way for philosophers to seek understanding of mind and language, which she sees as biological phenomena. She now draws together a series of groundbreaking essays which set out her approach to language. Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by prescriptive normative rules. Millikan offers a fundamentally different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, comparing them to biological norms that emerge from natural selection. This yields novel and quite radical consequences for our understanding of the nature of public linguistic meaning, the process of language understanding, how children learn
language, and the semantics/pragmatics distinction.

Language

A Biological Model

Ruth Garrett Millikan

Table of Contents

1. Language Conventions Made Simple2. In Defense of Public Language3. Meaning, Meaning, and Meaning4. The Son and the Daughter: On Sellars, Brandom, and Millikan5. The Language-Thought Partnership6. Why (most) Kinds are not Classes7. Cutting Philosophy of Language Down to Size8. Proper Function and Convention in Speech Acts9. Pushmi-pullyu Representations10. Semantics/Pragmatics (Purposes and Cross-Purposes)

Language

A Biological Model

Ruth Garrett Millikan

Author Information

Ruth Millikan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut.